Transcription
In this video, I want to show you something I took a lot of time to actually understand: how exactly do you build a successful team? How do you find the best talent? Because let's be honest, you can grow your company by yourself for a bit, but if you want to build something extremely ambitious with high goals and ambitious goals, you're going to have to build a dream team.
And I think a lot of people don't consider hiring as sales, but it is sales. If you want to be good at growing a company, you need to master sales. Because being an entrepreneur is all about sales. I wrote a LinkedIn post about it, but essentially it's about selling your vision to the team; it's about selling your product or service to your customer; it's about selling a new opportunity to a potential new hire; and that's what we're going to see in this video. It's about selling what you can accomplish in the next years to your investor; it's about selling your company for an exit, etc., etc. So, too long; don't do it. Most people want to avoid sales, but if you want to be successful, you must learn sales.
And to be honest, it's fine to suck at sales at first. I remember eight years ago when I knew nothing about sales; I used to be like the worst at just trying to push the features, etc., etc. And then I learned; I got a little bit better and better and better, and eventually you become good, then great. And that's when building a Dream Team became a lot easier.
In this video, I want to show you like three tools I use, like ChatGPT, to essentially like attract the top talents, and in very unconventional ways that you might have never seen anywhere. So I'm pretty excited to share with you this process that I've used to hire. Right now, we're a bit more than 100 people in the team, which means that in total, in the last, yes, six and a half years, I have hired maybe like hundreds of people, made a lot of mistakes along the way, and this process essentially allows me to avoid making these mistakes.
First things first: when you get started and people don't know you, like it was my case six or seven years ago, it's very, very hard to attract talent. And that's why the first step is to essentially build a strong personal brand. Because the more people you know, like, get to know you, and the more people know what you stand for, the easier it is for them to connect with you on an emotional level and then build more trust.
One important thing here: I will give you all this Notion document; it will be like the first link in the description below. It's free, no email required, no stress. So essentially, here, if you look at my personal story, so I've been building my $150 million company in public since day one, and sharing all the ups and downs publicly allowed me to attract a lot of really good talent. So typically, this is an email I received: "So after listening to your 480 videos and checking your ID box, click hi to contact you again. I'm not just an admirer of Lampire LM list; I use your products and I know their potential. The greater your business is, the more people you're going to attract because users are potentially becoming your next customers." And some candidates even surprised us with this kind of delivery; like we received funny posters; we had like so many creative applications. And that came simply because, you know, I've been documenting everything; I've been on podcasts; I've been doing all of that. So if you haven't checked my other videos on how to do so, do it, because down the line it will help you attract a lot more people.
But the second step to improve your hiring experience, in my opinion, and also the quality of people who apply—because this is the number one important thing—it would be exactly the same like if you have a broad messaging and you reach out to a lot of people: what is the percentage of people that's actually going to be interested in your product or service and that will be a relevant customer, meaning not a pain in the…? That percentage is going to be like extremely small. And this is the same with hiring: the broader your job description is, the larger the amount of people will apply, which might sound great at first, but actually it's the opposite. Because if you have to meet with that many people and they're not relevant, eventually you have what we call hiring fatigue. And hiring fatigue is basically when you decide to hire someone simply because they are like better than the other, but they're not exceptional. And you should never settle for average. There's a saying that says A players hire B players, who hire C players, etc., etc. But if the talent density in your company starts decreasing, your top performers are going to leave because they don't want to work with low performers, and then the whole company will be just exploding because of the low quality of talent. And that's something you want to avoid.
So how exactly do you attract the right talents? And the second step to improve your hiring experience is obviously the quality of the job description. Why should you have a good job description? One, because it will force you to define your expectations clearly. And I've seen so many job descriptions where you don't actually understand what the role is all about, what you're going to do, what is going to be the success criteria for people to join and be successful at their job. Like it's so unclear that everyone is lost. And then the second part, as I said, the quality of your job description determines the quality of the people you attract. I'm going to give like a very stupid example, and I, I'm not saying you should do it, but it's just for you to picture it: if you say, "I only want to have Harvard MBAs," and if you're not a Harvard MBA you shouldn't apply, yes, you're going to attract Harvard MBAs. I'm not saying that you should look at like schools and all these things, because I think it's pretty…, but it's just for you to picture this. And Harvard MBAs, obviously you would think that these people are quite smart; most of them are. So technically, you would attract only a very niche kind of audience, and that's what you want for each position: you want specialists; you want people who will excel at their job; and for that you need the right description. And this is actually like an answer I received from one of the job descriptions I had written: "Hey G, thanks again for sharing with me job desk; it's probably the best one I've seen in years; everything is crystal clear, and I'm really looking forward to digging it even more on the role itself. I'm free… blah blah." So as you can see, the reaction of people when they see a job description that stands out—they're not only going to think that the job description is great; they start having and picturing how the company works. Because if a job description is very clear, very well structured, and everything is sharp, then what do you think about the company? The company is the same. And that's why it's so important.
So how exactly do you write a good job description? For that, I've created like an awesome prompt in ChatGPT that you're going to be able to steal. First thing to remember with ChatGPT is input equals output. So obviously, if your input is bad, your output is bad. So how exactly do you make a good prompt? Obviously, it's like defining the role, then defining a specific goal. I use like the SMART framework, which is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound, and then give a straightforward task. So here what's the prompt like: "You are the CEO of Lire, a fast-growing scale-up…" So here I've described our company: "…you went from zero to $20 million in annual recurring revenue in less than five years without raising a single dollar, and you want to build a billion-dollar company in the next three years. To do so, you need to hire the best talent on the planet, and you know that your job description is critical for that. You're looking to hire your next Chief of Staff. You want that person to be extremely sharp, driven, and ambitious, so the job description should be attractive for people who love to work in challenging environments. Your company's mission is to help people and businesses grow. On top of having built multiple SaaS to help companies around the globe grow, you also leverage AI to grow your business a lot faster. Your goal is to create a job description that is so engaging that you will attract the top 1% of the Chief of Staffs on the market. The job description should be unique and showcase clearly the expectations for the first 30, 60, and 90 days. For the expectation part, add specific examples for each bullet point. You will also add clear and measurable OKRs, which stand for Objectives and Key Results, for the first 30, 60, and 90 days." In my opinion, this is like really important that part, because, because what you want is that people need to project what they're going to achieve, and OKRs is literally the best way. If you tell me like, "Hey, for this position you're going to have to, I don't know, like generate 20 meetings booked on the first month," okay, I know exactly what the role will look like. Then I put like the tone, etc., etc., and then you know I just do this and I let ChatGPT do the work. You will be able, of course, to copy-paste everything here; you just have to essentially like change it with your company, what your company does, what's your mission, where you want to take the company, etc. Overall, ChatGPT starts building the whole setup job, etc., etc. To be honest, I like the way it's laid out; it's very sharp; it's very clear. But that's not it. Here, typically I find that it's a lot of task for ChatGPT, so they might get confused. So what I usually do is add a bit more prompt. So here it's a lot of bullet points, etc., etc., and now I want to have specific examples. This is like a follow-up prompt that you could use. So typically, I'm just going to do this: for the expectation part here they added "a complete review of all SaaS tools and present insights to the co-…" Maybe I want more examples, so I'm just going to add that, and then ChatGPT is going to rewrite it and add more examples or more detailed examples.
The biggest issue I think with ChatGPT and the misunderstanding is that with one input you're going to get always the same output. This prompt, for example, can work extremely well for a specific role, and then for another it will not work so well. The idea behind ChatGPT is that you need to have like a sort of conversation and fine-tune whatever you want. If you want more examples, if you want more numbers, etc., etc., just ask, and ChatGPT will come up with it. So as you can see here, examples are a bit better; they are well structured, etc., etc., so it does the job. Usually, like they don't put very clear and measurable OKRs, so are the OKRs really like measurable, aligned Department goals? So for me this is not really measurable, so I'm just going to add that here, and it's going to rewrite pretty much everything, and this time with clear and measurable OKRs. Again, this was an example of everything I got here. You always need to put yourself in the shoes of the candidate. If, as a candidate, you start seeing a job description that is really well written, sharp, etc., obviously it's going to make a difference.
So the first step is rewrite that prompt for your own company and start testing and battle-testing it and compare it to your older job descriptions, and you will see that there's a big difference.
Once you have the job description done, in my opinion, this is where it looks a lot more like sales. Is hiring without outbound? For many years, I wasn't really doing outreach for hiring people; I don't know why, because I love doing outbound, but for hiring because we had, I felt, enough talent applying; I was just like, "Oh yeah, it's cool; we have already talented people," etc. But in reality, if you want the best of the best, like the A team, you will have to do outbound, because the most talented people are often not looking for a job. And to attract the most talented people, you need to always be in relationship with other people. And again, like something that's really important: you know that people, down the line in their career, they will want to change jobs. Let's take an example: let's say that you have a Head of Sales, a CMO, a COO, etc., etc., and each person is critical to the success of your team. If tomorrow one of them leaves, who's going to replace them? That's like a super important question for you as a CEO. You need, as a CEO, to always battle-test the risk of your company. If some people are like key people in the company and without them you'd be lost, and it would be like really annoying to keep the same growth and pace, etc., etc., then, for me, you're not doing your job. You should always have people in your network that, eventually, if someone in your team decides to leave for whatever reason—sometimes it can even be like personal reasons; they might be sick; someone in the family might be sick; you never know what can happen; life can happen—building a company takes so many years that you're going to see some crazy things along the way, trust me. Having like this very, like tight network of reaching out to people, always networking with people you would love to work with, eventually one day is your number one role as a CEO. Because when someone leaves, you need to be able to replace them as soon as possible and with someone talented.
So how exactly do you find these top performers? I'm going to show you the whole process, including ChatGPT and some cool stuff you can do between ChatGPT and LinkedIn. But typically, my message when I reach out is like: "Hey [first name], hope you're doing great. Currently looking for [role] to help with our hyper-growth to $100 million in annual recurring revenue in the next four years. I found your profile really interesting; would you be free for a chat to discuss this opportunity, or are you already living your best life with [company name]? Cheers, G." My signature. So as you can see, it's not like self-prospecting; it's very like straightforward; you don't have to pretend that you want to network or whatever. Because people, even if they are living their best life with their company, but they eventually think that one day they might be interesting in working with you, they will take the call.
And how exactly do you find these people? Because whenever you're doing headhunting, you need to understand which filters you're going to use in your LinkedIn search. As you can see, you can filter by company, job, location, seniority, etc., etc. So here I have like a dedicated prompt for that actually, and we're going to go through it together: "You're an experienced Talent Acquisition Manager who hired thousands of people for the most disruptive and innovative company. You specialize in finding top talents in unusual ways. As an experienced Head Hunter who has worked on LinkedIn for more than 15 years to find the best talents, you know the importance of the following factors: location, what they talk about, current company, past company, school, industry, profile, language. A typical search should look like this…" And then you know I give them location and everything that they should write. "Your role is to come up with 10 different searches that would be the perfect fit for the following job description," and here you need to insert your job description. Lucky for us, lucky for us, we just have the right job description here. So as you can see here, I copy-pasted the job description, then ChatGPT is going to start having all the filters that I can use. So location: San Francisco; talks about SaaS startup; current company: leading; past: hyper-growth startup; examples: Uber, Airbnb, example: Stripe, Zoom, etc. So they're actually giving like some really cool companies where actually it would be interesting for me to go and reach out to them; industry is perfect; the school is really like top-tier school, but it might be other kind of schools here. Once again, I can fine-tune my results, and instead of asking for many companies, I'm just going to ask them like to put like real names, etc. What's amazing with ChatGPT is typically, you know, you could start with only like the first search, so you're going to go to LinkedIn and you're going to start typing pretty much everything you want, start, you know, like typing the different companies, etc., etc. So here, for example, to hire my Chief of Staff, I can go here, I can type "Chief of Staff," and then on the side all filters. So here for company they say "CR"; for schools they were saying "Ash," so I'm just going to start to see, "Okay, no results found," so maybe like the search is actually too precise, so maybe, you know, I'm just going to remove this and I'm going to start showing the results. So here I've got like a few Chief of Staffs, then I could go on her profile and I could look at, "Okay, like she did a really good business school in France; she's based in Paris, which can be cool for us; she's like now Chief of Staff; she's been working for 10 years in a tech company; before that she actually did Business Development, which I think is quite cool for a company like LM list, where we do sales; cool profile; work 10 years." Again, with just one search like this, I could essentially reach out to her and offer the job of Chief of Staff or offer her to meet. I think her profile is really cool and relevant, and that's just with one search using ChatGPT. And again, you know, I can just fine-tune; maybe I would have never thought about Creo, so I can ask ChatGPT to come up with even more tech companies that are a bit less known and companies that recently raised, etc., etc. Like you can adapt and just have so many search criteria and filters that then, you know, it's super easy for you to just pick the right people, follow the filters. And typically here I could say, "ChatGPT, come up with 20 more searches," and that's exactly what it's going to do. And the creativity is unlimited; whether for you it's going to take you like so much time to actually create all of that, here you just have all the filters that you can use and leverage to start doing your outreach.
Once you play with all these filters, you're going to be able to find all the people. And what I don't like doing is messaging each people individually because it takes me a lot of time, and I also like don't usually follow up because it's very hard to track, etc. So I've created a Lemlist campaign that you can duplicate for free. The Lemlist campaign is pretty simple; first it starts with a visit profile. The goal of this visit, as we can see here, so I'm on her profile, so Mar is essentially going to receive a notification that I've been visiting her profile. And usually what do you do when you see that? Well, you go check the person's LinkedIn profile. And the great thing about it is that it will trigger curiosity, and people will start wondering why exactly are they visiting my profile. Then I send a message here that you can reuse; then I send an email to make sure that the person hasn't replied; then I visit their profile again; and then I send a follow-up. Very simple, very straightforward, not too pushy. And as you can see, the whole sequence is like five days max, and if eventually like the person would reply, the sequence will stop automatically. So if you have like your Lemlist account, you can just duplicate this campaign that's free for you, and you can just have fun and start finding the best talents.
But how exactly do I push new leads directly into this campaign? And that's where you always use a Lemlist Chrome extension. So here I'm on her profile; I just click on the Lemlist Chrome extension; automatically it's going to start like scraping all the information here, finding her email, etc., etc. So I just choose here what campaign I want to push her to, and usually I will go like to a hiring or headhunting campaign, and then I would import her in this campaign, and that's it. If I have a list, for example, from the search, if let's say I want to reach out to all these people, I can also open the Lemlist Chrome extension and select all the people here and send them into the campaign directly. By doing this, I'm just having meetings on autopilot with super interesting people that could join us to build a dream team. And that's like an important role as a CEO that you really want to focus on and focus on at all times. I think Steve Jobs was saying something like one of his main roles is to hire talented people and get out of their way. I've built a lot of my success off finding these truly gifted people and not settling for B and C players, but really going for the A players. And I found something; I found that when you get enough A players together, when you go through the incredible work to find, you know, five of these A players, they really like working with each other because they, they've never had a chance to do that before, and they don't want to work with B and C players. And so it becomes self-policing, and they only want to hire more A players, and so build up these pockets of A players, and it propagates. And that's what the Mac team was like; they were all A players. The role of a leader is to find the best team, showcase the vision, and then, you know, have people have fun and create something amazing all together. And again, if you don't have a Lemlist account, you can always copy-paste a message here. This is the kind of reply I receive: "Thanks for reaching out; I usually don't… ask her to message it like this… but the challenge looks interesting and I'd love to learn more; are you free Tuesday…?" This is actually like a real example of how we hired our Chief of Staff. I think in a month we had around like 20 people that we met and eventually went along on the process, and we hired a top Chief of Staff. Again, all the links are in the description below. I hope this was helpful; you will have access to the whole Notion, so you can copy-paste, see the example, learn from it, and I hope you have an awesome day. Peace.